I'm tired of bad auto exposure in games being defended as "eye adaption" or "happens in real life"

nkarafo

Member
This shit is not what your eyes see.

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Neither is this:

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No, stop it. Don't even think about it. You can clearly see what's outside the tunnel in real life. And yes, you can see outside your door or window when it's a bright day outside. Try it now! Amazing, right?

Whenever i see discussions about this completely crappy effect in modern games, i see so many defending it as being realistic because "this is how our eyes work". Really? All you see outside your window is a bright white shine and nothing else? Well, i'm sorry but if that's how your eyes work you must have them checked immediately.

This isn't eye adaption, this is just bad auto exposure settings. This is how crappy cameras work, not our eyes. A lot of games turn this effect to 11 because if you can show it, why be subtle about it?

Just look at it, look how in the first picture the white car turned to silver because of the intense, out of boundaries exposure.

I fucking hate it.

/rant
 
I'm with the dog, you're mixing up real life eyes with cameras and cinematic licence OP

Eyes have more dynamic range than life, but even moden displays don't. Thats why they used to and continue to use this effect.

What display/TV do you have OP? Exact model numbers only please. I can help.
 
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Battlefield 6 was guilty of this but thankfully they've dialed it back a bit. It still exists though and is annoying. Can't stand it.

Somewhat related glitch but this is seriously what you would sometimes see when looking out some windows in BF6; Nearly burned out my damn retinas playing it last night:

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I'm with the dog, you're mixing up real life eyes with cameras and cinematic licence OP

Eyes have more dynamic range than life, but even moden displays don't. Thats why they used to and continue to use this effect.

What display/TV do you have OP? Exact model numbers only please. I can help.
I know it's a camera defect. It's when they tell me it's also how human eyes work that grinds my gears.

Also no, older games didn't use that and they were fine without it. In fact, older games often look better because they don't have that.

I don't have a HDR display if that's what you are asking. And WRC Generations doesn't even have any HDR settings anyway, the game just looks broken like that no matter what.
 
Absolutely disgusting. This guy doesn't know what he is talking about.

Unless.... Am i the only one who doesn't have this eye defect?

Do i have super sight? Am i a super hero?
this shit was peak technology back then, very obnoxious today when we have actual HDR
 
I know it's a camera defect. It's when they tell me it's also how human eyes work that grinds my gears.

Also no, older games didn't use that and they were fine without it. In fact, older games often look better because they don't have that.

I don't have a HDR display if that's what you are asking. And WRC Generations doesn't even have any HDR settings anyway, the game just looks broken like that no matter what.

I agree its frustrating but games that dont do this have a flatter overall look when showing interiors and exteriors simultaneously, its a trade off.

It would be good if you could choose which you want but they won't spend the money to debug both modes unfortunately.
 
I think it can have a place if you're going for a more exaggerated feel. Like a drug addict appearing from a cave or someone in prison going outside or something. Its just a tool in a director's kit to use. I can agree it isn't really realistic.
 
Sometimes when the sunlight hits your eyes when you walk outside, it can kinda be like that.
Yes but this isn't what they try to emulate.

In games, when you look outside the window it always looks like a nuclear blast. It's not like it slowly clears up, it stays like that until you actually go outside. That's not how your eyes work otherwise we wouldn't have windows in our homes.

It's just the auto exposure setting, not "eye adaption".
 
I agree its frustrating but games that dont do this have a flatter overall look when showing interiors and exteriors simultaneously, its a trade off.

It would be good if you could choose which you want but they won't spend the money to debug both modes unfortunately.
I get it's the higher range that most cameras and monitors can't show. But it's not "eye adaption", it never was.

Also some games will do this even in HDR monitors because the effect is "baked". I assume WRC generations is like that since it doesn't have any HDR settings.
 
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I always assumed this was originally done to obfuscate streaming in the scene beyond the portal incrementally as the player approached it. I agree it looks shite, like a technical compromise.
 
This why I adore older games. None of the crappy cinematic stuff like this. The vignette effect is by far my least favorite. It makes my unconsciously strain my eyes.
 
didnt half life 2 source engine started this?


HDR is the first setting to turn off in any source engine game lol.
in tons of source mods this would give you an insane competitive advantage over people who keep it on. like in Insurgency, there were idiots who had it on and could not see shit in some maps xD
 
I think what gets misunderstood is the fact that this is not simulating how our eyes work in real life, but simulating the fact that outdoor natural lighting is orders of magnitude brighter than interior lighting. Our eyes are so good at dynamically adjusting,that we mostly don't notice the difference.

This can't be represented accurately, even on the highest end displays money can buy. So it's a pick your poison situation. Either display an inaccurate representation of the difference in brightness levels, or display an exaggerated bloom effect that represents this order of magnitude difference in brightness.

Edit: coincidentally, I was listening to a long form discussion on this very topic this morning. They were discussing some of the challenges of delivering an immersive and realistic environment in VR in the face of the inherent limitations of display technologies. This very point was brought up.
 
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It's simulating differences in light, eyes just have much higher range of differences they can see at the same time than a camera; like sunlight is super bright, just intensely ridiculously bright really, and all other lights are much weaker, to show that difference in an engine/camera is really hard without just bringing the range much closer together.
That's why you get this effect where it's essentially just translated to how a camera sees it.
 
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This shit is not what your eyes see.

N0cFtrxv3MR060b4.jpg



Neither is this:

EvAUUya4JQZHfiGp.png



No, stop it. Don't even think about it. You can clearly see what's outside the tunnel in real life. And yes, you can see outside your door or window when it's a bright day outside. Try it now! Amazing, right?

Whenever i see discussions about this completely crappy effect in modern games, i see so many defending it as being realistic because "this is how our eyes work". Really? All you see outside your window is a bright white shine and nothing else? Well, i'm sorry but if that's how your eyes work you must have them checked immediately.

This isn't eye adaption, this is just bad auto exposure settings. This is how crappy cameras work, not our eyes. A lot of games turn this effect to 11 because if you can show it, why be subtle about it?

Just look at it, look how in the first picture the white car turned to silver because of the intense, out of boundaries exposure.

I fucking hate it.

/rant
Some people will bitch about anything
 
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I like it when the effect isn't too over the top. But I tend to like other effects like vignetting, film grain, lens flares, etc.

The only one I really dislike is chromatic aberration.
 
This why I adore older games. None of the crappy cinematic stuff like this. The vignette effect is by far my least favorite. It makes my unconsciously strain my eyes.
Yeah, vignette is probably the second worst for me, first one being the auto exposure of course.
 
Agreed. It's dumb.

Like chromatic aberration, the realistic effect everyone loves, the auto exposure effect is merely emulating a shitty camera and bad lighting in cinema.
 
I agree its frustrating but games that dont do this have a flatter overall look when showing interiors and exteriors simultaneously, its a trade off.
I don't remember any game that looks any better or worse, lighting wise, for not having this. Older games look completely fine to me. Can you give an example of this trade off?

But even so, i prefer whatever regressions older games had for not having this. It can't be worse than not being able to see anything or the image adjusting the lighting as if you have some kind of auto-adjust brightness on your TV/monitor.

Yeah, I hated Ubisoft games for the entire last gen because they used this saturation so much. No idea how it is this gen.
Really bad. Almost all games do this, some more than others.
 
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Some game use this as a trick to transfer between inside lighting lut and outside lighting lut , Its very smart actually . Sometime to increase performance the outside/inside doesnt even have lighting until you step in/out .
 
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